PoetsWest Directory: Who's Who in Northwest Poetry

The PoetsWest Directory includes biographical profiles of well known Northwest poets and those not well enough known. While many of the poets have achieved recognition, PoetsWest also acknowledges the strengths and special gifts of other poets. Like so many of us living in the Pacific Northwest, many poets, especially those of an earlier generation, migrated here from other regions. Poets living and writing in the Northwest are often influenced by the expansive landscape, the water, and the weather (rain, usually). They recognize humanity's ambivalent relationship with the region and are witnesses to the effects of environmental destruction and unchecked urbanization. Their poetry often reveals a spiritual connection to the Native American and Asian cultures. The associations with the environment and other cultures, however, are more contemplative or subconscious, so there is not, as one might expect, a "regional" style of poetry. Each poet, including the Native American and Asian American, has his or her own style and distinctive voice. Links to individual web sites are highlighted. The list also includes those who have died. PoetsWest owes a debt of gratitude to Cory Hutzell, Western Washington University class of 2008, for his invaluable editorial assistance in providing updates of biographical profiles of the poets and writers in these pages. The listing will expand as we compile the information.

Click on letter corresponding to last name: A B C D | E F G H I J K L | M N O P Q | R S T U V W X Y Z

Ed Edmo
A Native American with Shoshone-Bannock affiliation, Ed is recognized internationally as poet, performer and storyteller of Northwest tribal culture. He is a consultant to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. He has narrated and/or adapted Indian stories and legends for theater and ballet performances and has conducted workshops throughout the country. He currently works with the Oregon Historical Society and the Chautauqua Program for the Oregon Council for the Humanities.

Anita Endrezze
A visual artist, fiction writer, and award-winning lyric poet, Anita received her B.A. and M.A. from Eastern Washington University. She writes from a bicultural heritage (Yaqui and European). Her poems have appeared in National Geographic, Yellow Silk and numerous anthologies, and have been published in ten countries and translated into several languages. She was the 1992 winner of the Bumbershoot Weyerhauser Publication Award for her book, At the Helm of Twilight, published by Broken Moon Press, 1992. She is currently working on a collection of family and tribal history told in poems, myths, paintings, and fiction. Anita Endrezze has published seven books, and is currently working on a collection of family and tribal history told in poems, myths, paintings and fiction.

Her other publications include:
Throwing fire at the Sun, water at the Moon, University of Arizona Press, 2000
The Humming of Stars and Bees and Waves, Making Waves Press, UK
Burning the Fields (chapbook), Confluence Press, Lewis and Clark State College, Lewiston ID, 1985
The North People, The Blue Cloud Quarterly Press.

J. Glenn Evans
Has written three collections of poetry and a novel, Broker Jim; several local community histories: Pike Place Market, North Bend-Snoqualmie, Renton, Gig Harbor, Bothell; a history of Sweden, Swedes-From Whence They Came, a biography on Levant Thompson, and Chasing His Dreams, a biography on Richard Shannon Thorp. His poems have been published in PoetsWest, Poets Table Anthology, Vintage Northwest, 4th Street, Poet's Ink, Writers in Performance Anthology, and The Open Door. J. Glenn Evans and Barbara Evans were jointly awarded the 1999 Faith Beamer Cooke Award by Washington Poets Association in recognition of service to the poetry community of Washington State. Evans also received the Second Place William Stafford Award at the 2002 Annual Conference of the Washington Poets Association and the 2003 Seattle Free Lances Outstanding Writer Award. He is listed in Who's Who in America 2001 and Who's Who in the World 2004. He is past president of AKCHO (Association of King County Historical Organization), president of Seattle Free Lances, Washington Poets Association, Pacific Northwest Historians Guild, and the Academy of American Poets. He served as the contest director of the 1997 Klondike Gold Rush Centennial Literary Contest and published the anthology of the winners. A former stockbroker-investment banker, he has engaged in mining and co-produced a movie, Christmas Mountain, featuring Slim Pickens.

His three poetry collections are:
Buffalo Tracks, SCW Publications, Seattle, 2003
Window In The Sky and Seattle Poems, both published by SCW Publications, Seattle, 1996.

Roger Fanning
A Seattle-based poet whose first book, The Island Itself, published in 1991, was a National Poetry Series selection. His second collection, Homesick, was published by Penguin in 2002. His poems were also included in The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets in 2000. He has taught at Warren Wilson College, Syracuse University and Bucknell University. His awards include the 1992 Whiting Award.

Lorraine Ferra
A native of the San Francisco Bay area, she now lives in Port Townsend, Washington. She is a poet-in-residence with several state arts commissions and travels much of the year teaching creative writing in schools and various community arts programs. She is the author of A Crow Doesn't Need a Shadow: A Guide to Writing Poetry and a chapbook Eating Bread (1994). Her poems, prose, and translations of Portuguese poetry have appeared in various literary journals.

Joan Fiset
Is the Writer in Residence at Richard Hugo House. Her collection of poetry, Now the Day Is Over, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 1997. She has been teaching for more than thirty years.

Kathleen Flenniken
Grew up in Richland, Washington, and earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Washington State University and UW. She worked as an engineer and hydrologist for eight years, three on the Hanford Reservation. Moved to Seattle in 1986 and lives there with her husband and their three children. When her children were very small, Kathleen began writing poems; she never returned to engineering. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University.

Her first collection of poems, Famous, won the 2005 Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry and was the third book in that series by the University of Nebraska Press. Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006) was named a Notable Book by the ALA and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She is a co-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press. She is the recipient of a 2005 Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2003 Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, along with grants from Artist Trust and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Flenniken's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Farm Pulp, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. She has taught poetry in the schools through the Washington State Arts Commission, Writers in the Schools, and Powerful Partners. Her website is www.kathleenflenniken.com.

Patrick Friesen (1945- )
Carry the Shadow, Porcepic Books, Vancouver, B.C., 1999
St. Mary at Main, Muses Co., Winnipeg, 1998
A Broken Bowl, Brick Books, 1997
Blaspheme's Wheel, Selected and New Poems, Turnstone Press, 1994
You Don't Get to be a Saint, Turnstone Press, 1992
Unearthly Horses, Turnstone Press, 1984

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William Scott Galasso (1952-)
Was born in New York, graduated from Hoffstra University in 1974, moved to California in 1978. On Valentine's day in 1990 he moved to Washington State with his wife Vicki. He has traveled extensively through the U.S., Western Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and throughout Europe, and Turkey and North Africa. He keeps in training and has participated in the STP cycling trip.
He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including his latest, Laughing Out Clouds, published in Sept. 2007. Other recent books include Blood (family) and Ink (Poems 1996-2003) and Odori, Blue (haiku/senryu) 2004, Rainbow Music and Vermillion Falling. He's organized two poetry festivals on the Eastside, served as MC/reader at the 2005 Ballard Arts festival and participated on Cable TV's channel 29 poetry series. In addition, he's appeared in Poets On, Bouillabaisse, Midwest Poetry Review and been published in Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England, Croatia, Romania and throughout the US. He sometimes hosts and organizes poetry events. In March 2006, he participated in the reading of Eliot Weinberger's What I Heard about Iraq, as the voice of Gen. Colin Powell. In January of 2007, he collaborated with the UW group Earth Now which sponsored a reading on Ecology and the Environment. In March, 2008 he was a featured reader for the PoetsWest poetry series on KSER 90.7 FM in Everett, WA. His next book Collage (New and Selected Poems) is due out in Winter 2008.

Tess Gallagher (1943- )
A poet, short story writer, and essayist, Tess Gallagher lives in Port Angeles, Washington. She is one of the most beloved and widely read authors in the world today. Educated at the University of Iowa (M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Poetry) and the University of Washington (B.A., M.A.), she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Whitman College in 1998. She has won numerous awards in both poetry and fiction, including the prestigious Nancy Blankenship Pryor Award (1999) for her unique contributions to the literary culture of the state of Washington. She has held teaching positions at universities around the U.S., most recently as the Edward F. Arnold Visiting Professor of English Chair at Whitman College (1996-1997) and Writer in Residence at Bucknell University (1998). Individual poems and books by Tess Gallagher have been translated into many languages, including Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, and Norwegian. She is the literary executor for the estate of her late husband, Raymond Carver, and was the consultant with Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt for the film, Short Cuts, based on a poem and nine of Carver's short stories. Visit Tom Luce's web site on Tess Gallagher www.whitman.edu/english/carver/reviews1.html. Besides new poems, Tess also worked on a book of oral stories with the Irish painter and storyteller, Josie Gray, The Courtship Stories. The following is only a partial listing of writings by Tess Gallagher.

Tess Gallagher's poetry collections include:
Portable Kisses, Bloodaxe Books, England, 1996; Earlier editions by Capra Press, 1994 and 1992
My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, England, 1995
Instructions to the Double, Carnegie-Mellon, 1994
Moon Crossing Bridge, Graywolf Press, 1992
Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1987, reprinted 1999
Willingly, Graywolf Press, 1984
Under Stars, Graywolf Press, 1978.

Other books and writings (partial list):
Introduction to Call If You Need Me, a collection of newly discovered stories by Raymond Carver, Harvill Press, England, July 2000, and Knopf, January, 2001
Essay "The Pure Place" published in Sleeping With One Eye Open, U of Georgia Press, 2000
Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (Collection of essays, letters, interviews, and journal entries), U of Michigan Press, Fall 2000
At the Owl Woman Saloon (Short stories), Scribner, 1997. Published in paperback by Simon & Schuster, 1999
The Lover of Horses (reprint), Graywolf Press, 1992
Introduction to Carver Country (Photographs by Bob Adelman with selections from stories and poems by Raymond Carver
A Concert of Tenses (Essays), U of Michigan Press, 1986.

Tomás L. Gayton (1945- )
Born and raised in Seattle, the grandson of black pioneers John T. Gayton and Magnolia (Scott) Gayton. Tomas began writing verse soon after graduating with a Juris Doctor from the University of Washington. Besides being a poet, Tomas is also a Civil Rights Attorney, social activist, world traveler, teacher, and lecturer. He is the oldest child of the Seattle jazz drummer Leonard Gayton and Leonard's wife Emma. Tomás grew up in Seattle's Mount Baker neighborhood overlooking Lake Washington and the Floating Bridge. He and his two younger brothers and sister attended John Muir Elementary School, Washington Junior High, Asa Mercer Junior High, and Franklin High School. He graduated from the UW and (in 1970) from the UW School of Law. In 1971, he received a Reginald Heber Smith Poverty Law Fellowship and began doing civil rights litigation in Seattle's Central Area. During that time he filed in Seattle's Federal District Court one of the first fair housing law suits. He worked with the Public Defenders office and had an office in Smith Tower. At the same time, right after graduating from law school, he began attending the verse writing seminar of Nelson Bentley (1918-1990). He says that he was then "well on my way to a love affair with words." In 1977, he moved to San Diego.

His work has appeared in various publications and literary journals, including The Seattle Times, The Seattle Review, Sheila Na Gig, San Diego's Vision Magazine, The Poetry Conspiracy, Urban Walls, Collectively Creatin', The National Catholic Reporter and Voices in Wartime. Vientos de Cambio/Winds of Change (Poetic Matrix Press, 2005), a bilingual volume of poetry is Tomás' fifth volume of prose and poetry. His other books are: Yazoo City Blues, Time of the Poet, Dark Symphony in Duet with the late Sarah Fabio, Two Races, One Face with John Peterson.

As a member of the Bicentennial Performing Arts Project of Pasadena, Tomás performed his obra with the poetry ensemble, Long Journey Home. He has recited his work at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, and Le Musee D'Art Moderne in Paris, France, Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle, Dizzy's jazz club and D.G. Wills in San Diego, Bukowski's in Vancouver BC, the Union Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) in Havana, Off Moroka Cafe Africaine in Capetown South Africa, La Noche in Lima Peru, Cafe Galeria, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

Tomãs has recited his poetry on KPFK, Pacifica radio, Los Angeles, and was featured on San Diego Profiles, CityTV. He has performed selected poems accompanied by noted jazz musicians Charles McPherson, Daniel Jackson, and cousin Clark Gayton. He has taught verse writing at San Diego's Writing Center and The Girls' Rehabilitation Facility. He conducted Poetry Workshops at D.G. Wills bookstore and cofounded San Diego Poets' Press. http://www.poeticmatrix.com/.

Gary Geddes (1940- )
His roots are in Vancouver, British Columbia. Gary Geddes received both his M.A. and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto. He has taught at Concordia University, the B.C. Institute of Technology, and the University of Victoria. He has been a visiting assistant professor at the University of Alberta and Carleton University and is the second Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He is a teacher, critic, editor, essayist, and award-winning poet, whose work has been published in Canada, England, China, Hong Kong, Ireland, the United States, and Chile, translated into five languages, and broadcast on CBC and BBC radio. His Twentieth Century Poetry & Poetics is considered a classic.

The following publications by this award-winning poet, playwright, represent only a partial listing:
Flying Blind, Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, N.Br., 1998
Twentieth Century Poetry & Poetics, Oxford University Press, 1996 (first published in 1973)
Active Trading: Selected Poems 1970-1995, Goose Lane, Fredericton, N.Br., 1996
The Perfect Cold Warrior, Quarry Press, Kingston, Ontario, 1995
Girl by the Water, Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, 1993
The Art of short fiction: an international anthology, HarperCollins, NY, 1993
Light of Burning Towers: Poems New & Selected, Vehicule Press, Montreal, 1990
No Easy Exit, Oolichan Books, Lantzville, B.C., 1989 (Awarded the Archibald Lampman Prize and the silver medal in the Milton Acorn Competition.)
I Didn't Notice the Mountain Growing Dark: Poems of Li Pai and Tu Fu (translated by Geddes and George Liang), Cormorant Books, Dunvegan, Ontario, 1988
Hong Kong Poems, Oberon Press, Ottawa, 1987
Changes of State, Coteau Books, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, 1986
The Unsettling of the West, Oberon Press, 1986
Terracotta Army, Oberon Press, Ottawa, 1984
The Acid Test, Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, 1981
Letter of the Master of Horse, Oberon Press, Ottawa, 1973
Rivers Inlet, Talonbooks, Vancouver, B.C., 1971.

Dr. Geddes' many literary awards include:
Gabriela Mistral Prize, 1995
Writers' Choice Award, 1988, for Hong Kong Poems
National Magazine Gold Award, 1987, for Hong Kong Poems
Americas Best Book Award, Commonwealth Poetry Competition, 1985, for The Terracotta Army
National Poetry Prize, 1981, for The Acid Test.

Rajaa A. Gharbi
Rajaa A. Gharbi is a highly respected and loved poet and artist. She was born and raised in Mediterranean Tunisia and has been writing and painting for as long as she can remember. A 1970s National Fencing champion in her native homeland, and a multimedia artist with the Troupe Nationale de Theatre de Marionnettes in Tunis since Middle school, she had to choose between a life long commitment tofencing or the arts. She left her national team's fencing strips and her gold medals for literature, and multimedia arts.
Gharbi has also lived in Morocco, her grandfathers' homeland, Spain, and France where she has created artwork in poetry and film. She has been living in the United States and Tunisia since 1982. Although she writes every day, Gharbi limits her published literary work to distilled selections.

Gharbi is the first North African English language poet in the United States to have been published and awarded public funding for literary work (1986-2006). Her poetry and visual art have been published, presented, critiqued and anthologized by literary and art scholars from North Africa and the United states. She has read from her published poetry and prosems, and has had her visual artwork presented at local, national and international events, solo and group exhibitions since 1989.

Between 2001 and 2007 her poetry and paintings were celebrated in a number of events that include a 2006 Honor retrospective exhibition, poetry recital, and book signing of her poetry and paintings book titled ...From Songs of a Grasshopper (Kehna Publications 2004). This event was given by H.E. Mohamed Najib Hachana, Ambassador of Tunisia to the United States in Washington DC. Among these events also was a special inclusion in the new Anthology of Arab American Artists, Artists of the American Mosaic, Dr Fayeq S. Oweis (Heinemann 2007), a 2006 extensive study of her poetry presented by North African Literature professor and Literary critic Najib Redouane at the Eighth International Symposium on Comparative Literature, Cairo, Egypt. In 2006, on the occasion of Tunisia's 50th year of independence, Gharbi was the first North African English language poet to be invited to publish poetry work in the international Expressions Maghrebines anthology.

Gharbi's readings from her poetry, essays, and visual art works published in the United States also include a 2006 opening keynote address, Working Mother Magazine's Town Hall, the African Diaspora International Film Festival at Columbia University, and other universities, International Indigenous Synergy at the American Indian Contemporary Art Center in San Francisco, National Public Radio, Bumbershoot's International Readers program, Seattle's Langston Hughes Arts Center, the Intiman Theatre, PBS's International Goodwill Arts Festival, Voice of America, National Public Radio, the Elliott Bay Book Company, the 2005 Alliance Francaise's Journee Internationale de la Francophonie, Poets Against the War 1991 and 2004, and Gallery 110, M. Rosetta Hunter and Art & Soul galleries, Ghayya Gallery & Studios, the C.M. Russell Museum, and the Museum of the Great Plains.

Rajaa A. Gharbi owes most of her "informal" education in language and art to her parents, her paternal grand-mother, her native and her adoptive homelands (although she feels owned by the land not an owner of it). Her formal education is in fine art, filmmaking, creative writing, and socio-linguistics with a MA degree in Transcultural Communications. Gharbi is a member of the academy of American Poets and Washington Lawyers for the Arts. She is currently the editor and translator of the first US English Language anthology of North African literature (2009).
For more information on Gharbi's work, to book a reading or request a studio visit, please email rajaagharbi@q.com or call 206.937.2887.

Kuldip Gill
Born in Punjab, India, she immigrated to Canada at the age of five. She worked in forestry and mining before earning a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from University of British Columbia. She has taught at UBC, Simon Frazier University and at Open Learning Canada, in Burnaby. Her ethnographic areas of interest include South Asia (India and Sri Lanka) and the South Pacific (Fiji). She studied Creative Writing at UBC, Langara College (Vancouver), Banff School of Fine Arts, and Booming Ground Writers Community (1999) UBC. She was B.C. Coordinator of the Canadian Interracial and Intercultural Education Project from the University of Toronto. She is a past president of the Vancouver YWCA, past president of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women of B.C.; and director or member of many other associations. She has served on the editorial board of Prism International. Kuldip is interested in women's issues, the immigrant experience and cultural diversity.Her book, Dharma Rasa, (Nightwood Editions, 1999) received the B.C. Book Award in 2000. She lives in Vancouver, B.C. She teaches a creative writing class (poetry) at the University College of the Fraser Valley. Her poetry has aired on radio; and she has given readings in many libraries, colleges and community venues. Her work has appeared in periodicals such as Event, B.C. Studies, Contemporary Verse 2, and AMSSA-Cultures West. Kildeer's Dance, limited edition broadside, was published in The Poet's Series; illustrated by Jim Rimmer. Colophon Books (1999). Her work also appears in Isis Rising: The Goddess in the New Aeon, An Anthology of Poetry and Art (Temple of Isis, 2000).

Arthur Ginsberg
Arthur Ginsberg is a Montreal-born neurologist and poet, currently living in Seattle. He has studied poetry with Nelson and Beth Bentley, Galway Kinnell and Jana Harris at the University of Washington. He is the author of a book of poems, Walking the Panther, published by Northwoods Press, 1984. Other poems have appeared in Embers, Prickly Pear, Spindrift, Journal of the AMA, Arnazella, Paper Boat, Lucid Stone, Pontoon, Afterthoughts, PoetsWest, and Switched-on Gutenberg. He is an author in Blood and Bone, a medical anthology to be published by University of Iowa Press. His hobbies include clarinet and under-sea photography. His book of poems, Faith is the Next Breath, was published by Pudding House Press.

Harvey Goldner (1942-2007)
A much loved Seattle poet who was well known at open mike venues for his poems about the struggles of everyday life, his loves, his childhood, and the changing Belltown neighborhood where he lived. A native of Tennessee, he lived most of his life in Seattle, but remained a mystery to those who knew him. He also drove a taxi a couple of nights a week "to keep body and soul together."
He started writing when he was in high school. A graduate of Rhodes College in Memphis, he did graduate work in classical literature at the University of New Mexico.
His poetry books include:
Memphis Jack, American Flyer and Her Bright Bottom published by Spankstra Press in Seattle, and New Millennium Business. His latest collection, The Resurrection of Bert Ringold, was published posthumously by Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso, Texas.

Chad Goller-Sojourner
Seattle-based poet, spoken word performance artist and 2007-2008, Seattle Poet Populist Nominee. His inaugural chapbook entitled Born One Thousand Years Too Early: Fat, Dark-Skinned, Gay and Adopted by White Folks. A Fragmentary Journey Towards Alignment received accolades from Maya Angelou and has been described as poignant, chilling and prophetic. Recently he served as the creator, executive producer and artistic director for People of Color Against Aids Network Presents: Standing In The Gap- And Speaking Their Names - Black Gay Poets Honor Their Ancestors - A Spoken Word Requiem. In 2007 he was selected by the Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas to participate in their year-long new works Creation Project which is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and The Microsoft Corporation. To learn more about Chad Goller-Sojourner, visit www.goller-sojourner.com.

Jorge Enrique González-Pacheco (1969 -)
Poet and writer born in the District of Marianao, Havana, Cuba on September 9, 1969. He moved to the United States in 2003, and since 2006 has been living in Seattle, where he cultivates his dearest passion: writing. Author of the following books and anthologies: Poesía Ilustrada, (New York, 1992- USA); Antología de la Décima Cósmica de La Habana, (México D.F, 2003- México); Notaciones del inocente, (Moguer, Andalucía, 2003- Spain); Tierra de Secreta Transparencia, (Madrid, 2004- Spain), an anthology of poems by Cuban poet Serafina Nuñez; Bajo la luz de mi sangre / Under the light of my blood (Bilingual Edition, Victoria BC, 2009-Canada). He also has completed one unpublished poetry book: Yo Árbol, Molécula Secreta. His poetry and journalism have been translated into French, Portuguese, and English.

Jorge Enrique studied Philosophy and Hispanic Literature in Cuba and Spain. For several years, he worked for ICAIC, the Cuban Film Institute in Havana. At present he is the curator of the Seattle International Latino Film Festival (www.cineseattle.org).  From 1991 to the present date he has published poetry and prose in magazines, anthologies, newspapers, and virtual editions in Cuba, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Chile and Brazil.  His poetry has been read in Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, including at the Miami Book Fair International in 2003 and 2004. In January 2008, he read at Seattle University for its International Week; he was the only Hispanic poet invited and November he had a lecture at South Florida University in Tampa. He was a sponsor of the Concert in Memoriam of the Spanish Musical Composer Joaquin Rodrigo, Havana, Cuba - November 2002. From 1994 to 2000, Jorge Enrique collaborated in the preparation of programs on Cuban culture that were included in the curricula of the University of California, Riverside; the Pedagogical University of Orleans, France; and the University of Loyola, Chicago.

Janice Gould (1949- )
This award-winning poet of Native American (Koyangk'auwi Maidu) and European descent has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Geography of Home: California's Poetry of Place. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Linguistics and M.A. in English, she earned her doctorate from the University of New Mexico. Her poetry has been published several journals, including American Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner, and anthologies. She has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Astraea Foundation. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches poetry, writes, and studies classical guitar. Her collections of poetry include:
Earthquake Weather: Poems, U of Arizona Press, 1996
Alphabet (art and poetry), May Day Press, 1996
Beneath My Heart, Firebrand Books, Ithaca, NY, 1990.

Neile Graham

Jim Grabill
Lives in Portland, Oregon, and is the author of One River (Momentum Press, 1975), Clouds Blowing Away (Seizure and kayak Books, 1976), To Other Beings (Lynx House Press, 1981), In the Coiled Light (NRG, 1985), Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in Someone (Lynx House Press, 1994; winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, 1995), Through the Green Fire: Personal Essays, Prose Poems, and Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 1995), Listening to the Leaves Form (Lynx House Press, 1997), Lame Duck Eternity (26 Books, 2001), An Indigo Scent after the Rain (Lynx House Press/Eastern Washington University Press, 2003), Finding the Top of the Sky (Lost Horse Press, 2005--creative nonfiction), and October Wind (Sage Hill Press, 2006).

His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Common Review, Willow Springs, East West Journal, Poetry East, Mirror Northwest, Caliban, kayak, Ur Vox, South Dakota Review, Minnesota Review, Cimarron Review, Barnabe Mountain Review, Pemmican, Pemmican Online, Windfall, Poet Lore, Field, The Grove Review, New Age Journal, and many other literary periodicals. His work is also widely published in online periodicals. He can be reached through his email: jimg@clackamas.edu.

Kate Gray
Her mornings are full of dog walks and writing, and her days are full of classes and compositions. Kate Gray's chapbook, Bone Knowing, won the 2006 Gertrude poetry contest, and Cedar House Press will release her first full-length book early 2007. Lately, she's gone to the dark side and entered the dangerous world of writing fiction. She's part of the Dangerous Writing community in Portland, Oregon where she has lived for twenty years. Her poems and stories have appeared in literary magazines such as Seattle Review, Mid-American Review, Calyx, and more. She is an editor of Clackamas Literary Review.

Joseph Green
Born in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and grew up in Long Beach, California. He moved to Sumner, Washington in 1971 as a VISTA volunteer, and with the exception of a year spent traveling in México, Guatemala, and Southern California, he has been in the Northwest ever since. As PEN Northwest's Boyden Wilderness Writer for 2000, Joseph Green spent seven months at the Dutch Henry Homestead in Oregon's Rogue River Canyon. That experience produced many of the poems in The End of Forgiveness, which won the Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award for 2001. His poems have also been collected in His Inadequate Vocabulary (Signpost Press, 1986), Deluxe Motel (The Signpost Press, 1991), and Greatest Hits: 1975-2000 (Pudding House Publications, 2001). A July 2002 residency at Fundación Valparaiso, in Mojãcar, Spain has given shape to more poems. Green teaches English and literature at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington. His poems have appeared in The Bellingham Review, Crab Creek Review, 5 AM, Free Lunch, Hubbub, Pearl, Pontoon, Slipstream, The Threepenny Review, Wilderness, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA all publications in the US, as well as Departures: New Series in Ireland, and Litspeak Dresden in Germany.

Sally Green
Co-Publisher, with her husband Sam, of Brooding Heron Press & Bindery, of fine editions of poetry. Sally's work has won numerous awards for design and production. She and Sam live and work on Waldron Island in the Puget Sound, in a hand-built cabin, without electricity, printing on a treadle-operated platen press.

Samuel Green (1948- )
Washington State's first Poet Laureatte (2007-08), and a Northwest native, Sam Green was educated at Highline Community College, Western Washington University (B.A. and M.A.), and the University of Washington. Long active as a teacher and artist-in-residence, he has conducted workshops at schools and colleges and penal institutions, and has done numerous public readings. He currently is editor and co-publisher (with his wife, Sally) of Brooding Heron Press. Widely published, his poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Poet & Critic, Zyzzyva, Yellow Silk, and Prairie Schooner.

His more recent poetry collections include:
The Grace of Necessity, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2008
The Only Time We Have, Grey Spider Press, 2002
Vertebrae, Eastern Washington University Press, 1994
Working in the Dark, Grey Spider Press.

James Gurley

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John Haines (1924- )
The son of a Naval officer, John Haines was born in Norfolk, Virginia. He studied painting and sculpture in New York and Washington. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, then in 1947 he moved to Alaska to homestead and began writing poetry. He was Poet in Residence at the University of Alaska, and he has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship twice and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Alaska Governor's Award, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award, the Poet's Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Western State Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. He is currently living in Missoula, Montana. In 2008 he received the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry.

A partial list of John Haines's titles includes:
For the Century's End: Poems 1990-1999, Univ. of Washington Press, 2001
At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954, Copper Canyon Press, 1997
Dreamer: Collected Poems, Graywolf Press, 1993
New Poems: 1980-1988, Story Line Press, 1993
News From the Glacier: Selected Poems 1960-1980, Wesleyan University Press, 1982
Living Off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place, University of Michigan Press, 1981
Cicada, Wesleyan University Press, 1977
In a Dusty Light, Graywolf Press, 1977
North by West: A Collection of Poetry (with William Stafford), Spring Rain Press, 1975
Twenty Poems, Unicorn Press, 1971
The Stone Harp, Wesleyan University Press, 1971
The Owl in the Mask of the Winter News: Poems, Wesleyan University, 1966

Hazel Hall (1886-1924)
Widely published during her brief lifetime, Hazel Hall has been rescued from obscurity by a renewed interest in her work. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Hazel Hall became an invalid after surviving scarlet fever as a child. Confined to a wheelchair, she lived in Portland, Oregon with her mother and sister and helped to support the family by doing fine needlework for wealthy families in the Portland area. From 1916 through 1924 her poems received national attention but after her untimely death on May 11th, 1924, her work drifted into obscurity. Her first book, Curtains (1921), is a collection of "sewing" poems. Walkers, her second book, was released in 1923. The Cry of Time was published posthumously in 1928.

Sometimes called the Emily Dickinson of the West because of the pristine qualities of her work, Hazel Hall is being rediscovered and recognized. Beth Bentley selected and edited The Selected Poems of Hazel Hall, recently published by Ahsahta Press of Boise State University. Susan Mach's (of Clackamas Community College) play about Hazel Hall's life, Monograms, was produced by the Portland Repertory Theater. The feminist anthology, No More Masks, includes Hall's work. Oregon State University recently published The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall. Other honors include an annual poetry award named for her, and the listing of the family home at 106 NW 22 Place in Portland on the National Register of Historic Places. On Mother's Day in May, 2000 the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission dedicated a "poetry garden" and memorial to Hall.

James Byron Hall
Bill Witherup describes James B. Hall as a very fine poet, mentor and long time-friend. "I still send new work to him, which comes back spider-webbed with suggestions." He also was Ken Kesey's mentor. He lives in Portland and has published two books of poetry, his latest being Bereavements: Selected And Collected Poems (Storyline/Castle Peak, 1991).

Kathleen Halme
Grew up in Wakefield, a post-mining town in Michigan's upper peninsula. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where her work was awarded the Hopwood Creative Writing Award. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry and a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship in anthropology. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review and Anthropological Quarterly.
Her three books of poetry are Every Substance Clothed, winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series and the Balcones Poetry Prize, Equipoise from Sarabande Books and her newest collection, Drift and Pulse, from Carnegie Mellon University Press (2007). She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.

Mark Halperin
Has taught in Japan and Russia, and is a translator of Russian poetry. He currently teaches at Central Washington University in Ellensberg. His most recent collection of poetry is Time as Distance (New Issues Press, Western Michigan University, 2001). His other collections include a chapbook Near and Far (March Street Press) and Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications).

Barbara J. Hamby
Born in California, Barbara Hamby lives in Vancouver, Washington. She is the recipient of several awards and the author of Trilogy: Love Lines, Life Lines, Laugh Lines (1998) and My Muse Has Many Moods (1995).

Sam Hamill (1943- )
Sam Hamill is the widely respected founding editor of Copper Canyon Press, and has served as distinguished poet, translator, essayist, and editor for more than three decades, becoming a major influence on American poetry. Born in northern California in 1943, he was orphaned as an infant and adopted by a Utah farm family. While his childhood was fractured by domestic violence, his adopted family also exposed him to poetry at an early age, which he has claimed as a "life-saving grace." Influenced by Kenneth Rexroth and the Beat poets and by the High Modernists, through Zen practice and a lifetime of independent study, Hamill found another way to define his life through "the practice of poetry." His poetry interweaves aspects of classical Asian philosophy and literary traditions with Western—and specifically western American—culture. He taught in artists-in-residence programs for twenty years, worked in domestic violence programs for more than twenty years, and taught in American prisons for thirteen years. He has worked extensively with musicians ranging from blues bands to jazz, and his performance with shakuhachi and koto music, Heart of Bamboo, is available on CD. A contributing editor at The American Poetry Review and director of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, he continues to advocate on behalf of "poetry as an economy of the gift,"and "is still attending to homework," although his achievements and commitment to poetry make him a national treasure.

Sam is the founder and primary spokesman for Poets Against the War. In view of the Bush administration's plans for its pre-emptive war against Iraq, Sam declined an invitation from Laura Bush to attend a White House symposium on Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes scheduled for February 2003. The symposium was cancelled after Sam asked poets to speak out against the war. The outpouring of voices who responded to Sam's invitation echoed his conviction that poets are advocates for peace, democratic principles and the community of nations. Thousands of poems from around the world have been posted on the web site.

Sam Hamill has contributed essays and poetry to anthologies and literary magazines that are too numerous to list here. He has translated poetry from the Chinese, Japanese, Latin, Estonian, and Greek. A partial list of his work as a translator includes:

Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese, BOA Editions, 2000
The Art of Writing (the Wen Fu of Lu Chi), [revised], Milkweed Editions, 2000
Narrow Road to the Interior & Other Writings of Basho, Shambhala Classics, 2000
The Essential Basho, Shambhala, 1998 The Essential Chuang Tzu (with J.P. Seaton), Shambhala, 1998
The Spring of My Life & Selected Poems of Kobayashi Issa, Shambhala, 1997
River of Stars: Selected Poems of Yosano Akiko (with Keiko Matsui Gibson), Shambhala, 1996
Only Companion: Japanese Poems of Love and Longing, Shambhala, 1996
The Infinite Moment: Poems from Ancient Greek, New Directions, 1992

Sam Hamill's collections of poetry include:
Measured by Stone, Curbstone Press, 2007
Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems & Translations (Shambhala, 2005)
Pisan Canto, Floating Bridge Press, 2004
Dumb Luck, BOA Editions, 2002 (PNW Booksellers Award, 2003)
Gratitude: Poems by Sam Hamill, BOA Editions, 1998
Destination Zero: Poems 1970-1995, White Pine, Fredonia, NY, 1995
Mandala, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 1991
A Dragon in the Clouds, Broken Moon, Seattle, 1989
Passport, Broken Moon, Seattle, 1988
The Nootka Rose, Breitenbush, Portland, 1987
Fatal Pleasure, Breitenbush, 1984
animae, Copper Canyon, 1980
Triada, Copper Canyon, 1978
The Book of Elegiac Geography, Bookstore, 1978
The Calling across Forever, Copper Canyon, 1976
Petroglyphs, Three Rivers Press, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, 1975

A partial list of his other writings include:
Sacramental Acts: The Love Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (Editor,with Elaine L. Kleiner), 1997
The Gift of Tongues: Twenty-Five Years of Poetry from Copper Canyon Press (Editor and Introduction), Copper Canyon, 1996
The Erotic Spirit: An Anthology of Poems of Sensuality, Love, and Longing (Editor), Shambhala, 1996
A Poet's Work: The Other Side of Poetry (essays), Broken Moon, 1990
Basho's Ghost (poetry and prose), Broken Moon, 1989
Selected Poems of Thomas McGrath (Editor), Copper Canyon, 1988
At Home in the World (essays), Jawbone Press, 1980.

A partial list of Sam Hamill's awards includes:
Governor's Arts Award, 2000
Pushcart Prize, 1996 and 1989
Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writing Fellowship, 1992
Washington Governor's Writer's Day Award, 1990
National Book Critics Circle Nomination, 1989
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1983
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1980
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, 1980.

Kenneth O. Hanson (1922- )
Born in Idaho, he received his B.A. from the University of Idaho. In graduate school at the University of Washington, he focused on English Literature and Chinese language. Under a Fulbright grant in 1962, he attended the Institute of Chinese Civilization on Formosa. Kenneth Hanson was professor of Literature and Humanities at Reed College. He is a two-time winner of the Theodore Roethke Award.

Well known for his translations from the Chinese, his other titles include:
Lighting the Night Sky, Breitenbush Books, 1983 The Uncorrected World, Wesleyan University Press, 1973
Poems by Palamas and Elytis, Press-22, Portland, Oregon, 1972
Saronikos and Other Poems, Press-22, 1970
The Distance Anywhere, U of Washington Press, 1967 (Winner of the PNW Booksellers Award and the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1966 by the Academy of American Poets).

Nicole Hardy
Lives in Seattle where she works as a waitress and a teacher.  Her chapbook Mud Flap Girl's XX Guide to Facial Profiling was the finalist in Main Street Rag's 2006 chapbook contest and was published later that year as part of its Editor's Choice chapbook series.  She earned her MFA at the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and was nominated for a 2007 Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Margie, 5 AM, Spillway, Eclipse, SLAB, Soundings East, The Red Wheelbarrow, and The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. She has recently completed a full-length manuscript, and hopes it will find a home soon.

Edward Harkness (1947- )
Born in Bremerton, Washington and educated at the University of Washington (B.A.) and the University of Montana (M.F.A.). Active in community and school poetry programs throughout the Northwest, he is currently teaching English at Shoreline Community College in Shoreline, Washington. His poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, New Letters, Northwest Review, and Ploughshares.

His collections of poetry include:
Saying the Necessary from Pleasure Boat Studio on Bainbridge Island (2000)
Watercolor Painting of a Bamboo Rake, Brooding Heron Press (1994)
Fiddle Wrapped in a Gunny Sack, Dooryard Press (1984)
Caretaker, Confluence Press (1978)
Long Eye Lost Wind Forgive Me, Copperhead Press (1975).

Jerry Harp (1961- )
Grew up in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, a small town on the Ohio River once known as the thermoplastic capital of the world. He is of uncertain ancestry, though he may be descended from a notorious band of early American riverboat pirates known as the Harpes. He attended Mt. Vernon High School and then Saint Meinrad College (B.A., English 1983), a seminary run by Benedictine monks. His advanced degrees come from Saint Louis University (M.A., English, 1985), the University of Florida (M.F.A., Poetry, 1991), and the University of Iowa (Ph.D., English, 2002), where he studied Renaissance Literature. His books of poems are Creature (Salt Publishing, 2003), Gatherings (Ashland Poetry Press, 2005 co-winner of the 2004 Robert McGovern Publication Prize), and Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains (Salt Publishing, 2006). His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review and Pleiades. He is currently working on a book about the work of Donald Justice. Recent poems of his appear or are forthcoming in Delmar, The Iowa Review, The Journal, Kenyon Review, and Verse. He co-edited, with Jan Weissmiller, A Poetry Criticism Reader (University of Iowa Press, 2006). He teaches at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

Carol Ely Harper (1904-2000)
This remarkable Northwest figure was a poet, novelist, editor, publisher, and sometime actress. She was born in Missouri but grew up in Walla Walla, attended Whitman College as a young woman, and graduated from the Whitman College Conservatory of Music in 1929. Known for her bold vision, she founded Experiment Press and in the 1940s began publishing poetry out of her home. Then in the 1950s she attended the University of Washington, (B.A.1952), and did graduate studies at the University of Birmingham in England before returning to UW for her M.F.A.(1959). She contributed poetry to periodicals like Prairie Schooner or the Massachusetts Review, occasionally under the pseudonym Ilke Ben. Her own poetry collections include the verse novel, Big Bend of Columbia River, Experiment Press (1976), Distichs for a Dancer, Alan Swallow (1950), and To a Faulty Lover, Alan Swallow (1946).

Sheri A. Harper
Writer and poet with B.S. in Computer Science from Western Washington University. Completed the University of Washington's Extension Writing Certificate program. Poems published in several small journals and two chapbooks, Natural Selections, and Decalmaker (Pudding House Press, 2007). She is currently working on a second science fiction novel and a number of short stories.

Jana Harris

Irene D. Hays
A native of Washington State, she lives in the shrub-steppe landscape of eastern Washington where she celebrates her time to write and enjoy family and friends. She has made her home also in Hawaii, Idaho, Seattle, Colorado, and Santa Barbara, and finds in each location a natural setting that inspires her poetry and sustains her spirit. She has lived and worked as a teacher, writer, and manager and director of school-based and workplace education programs for Battelle. She holds a doctorate in education from Seattle University.

Her poems have appeared in CLAYX, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Inspirit, Her Mark 2007, Creekwalker, Penwood Review, Fresh Ink, and In Our Own Words, among others. Awards include First Place and publication in Fresh Ink, Honorable Mention in Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction 2006 Poetry Contest, as a finalist in Atlanta Review's Poetry 2006, and as a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition. Her first chapbook, The Measure of Loss, was published in 2007 by Pudding House Publications and draws from her experience parenting her parents as they gave way to old age and, finally, death. Her hope is that her poems will help other caregivers of parents know they are not alone. FootHills Press recently (2008) released her second chapbook, Witness: Landscape to Inscape. This chapbook features the shrub-steppe grassland of eastern Washington.

Esther Altshul Helfgott(1941- )
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Esther settled in the Pacific Northwest in 1970. She has lived in Seattle since 1976. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington where she wrote a thesis on the politics and poetry of Holocaust poet, Irena Klepfisz. Esther's work has appeared in numerous in-print & on-line journals, including The Dakota House Journal, Mentress Moon, The Baltimore Jewish Times, Poets West, The American Psychoanalyst, The Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Review, Switched-on-Gutenberg, Chrysanthemum, and The Jewish Observer.

She is the author of The Homeless One: A Poem in Many Voices (KotaPress, 1999) a play about homelessness & schizophrenia, and she is currently working on a book about Seattle child psychoanalyst, Edith Buxbaum. Shelter, as a practical reality and as a metaphor for living in community, is at the core of Esther's thinking. She views the page as a haven, not for the purpose of hiding, but as a means of cultivating that place within the self that works most effectively to bring about real and metaphorical shelter — regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual preference — to all who live among us — the homeless, the mentally ill, the disabled, the different, the old. StreetWrites, a homeless women's writing/performance workshop, under the direction of Ruth Fox and Lauren Kauchansky, performed The Homeless One as a play last year in several Seattle locations: WHEEL Women's Empowerment Center, Church of Mary Magdalene, May West Fest for Women Playwrights, Barnes and Noble (University Village), Antioch University Breakfast for Homeless Women, and Wit's End Book Store Back Stage Theatre.

Esther is the founding coordinator, since 1989, of Seattle's It's About Time Writers Reading Series at the Seattle Public Library where beginning and experienced writers and poets read from their work. She teaches writing classes and workshops in Seattle, WA. and is a writing consultant with a special interest in poetry & the writing process.

Esther Altshul Helfgott edits and publishes The Psychoanalytic Experience: Analysands Speak, an anthology of voices written from the client's perspective. Since the September 11th bombings, Esther created and edits the e-journal September 11, 2001: a journal on the writer's role in society. Contributors are invited to answer the question: What is the writer's responsibility to self & society? Esther can be reached at eahelfgott2@comcast.net. The journal sponsored by Its About Time, September 11, 2001: a journal of the writer's role in society can be found at www.itsaboutimewriters.homestead.com/Sept112001coverpge.html.

Terry Hertzler
Owns Caernarvon Press, a small literary press based in San Diego that has published poetry and short fiction since 1985, including work by Steve Kowit, Brandon Cesmat, Lori Davis, and many others. He has worked as a writer and editor for close to 30 years, and has taught writing at the university level as well as for The Writing Center and the Southern California Writers' Conference. His poetry and short stories have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Writer, North American Review, Margie, and Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, as well as being produced on stage and for radio and television. His publications include two books of poetry, Second Skin and The Way of the Snake (on the war in Vietnam), and several chapbooks of poetry and short fiction. He has been organizing poetry workshops and reading series in Southern California for more than 20 years, including the current Second Sunday at Open Door Books in Pacific Beach. He lived in British Columbia, Canada in the early 1980s and currently resides in San Diego.

Alicia Hokanson

Keith Holyoak (1950 - )
Poet, translator of classical Chinese poetry, and cognitive scientist, Keith Holyoak was raised on a dairy farm in British Columbia, Canada. He received his B.A. from the University of British Columbia and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. He is now Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His poems and translations have been published in magazines in the US, Canada, England, Ireland, Austria, and New Zealand, including The London Magazine, Envoi, Orbis, Candelabrum Poetry Magazine, Poetry NZ, Poem, The Lyric, Red Rock Review, Edge City Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Raintown Review, Red Rock Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, Two Lines, and Bellowing Ark.

Keith Holyoak's CD Descent, released in 2006, mixes his apocalyptic poem, Descent, with instrumental punk rock music. 2007 saw the release of a CD of his translations of classical Chinese poetry, Poems of Li Bai, mixed with the music of the classical Chinese lute (qin). For more information on these CDs, check www.BrokenElectric.com.

Keith Holyoak's bilingual collection of translations of poems by the two greatest poets in Chinese literature, Facing the Moon: Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu, was published in 2007 by Oyster River Press. The book, which includes original Chinese landscape paintings and calligraphy, can be ordered directly from the publisher at www.OysterRiverPress.com or from amazon.com.
Keith Holyoak: Facing the Moon: Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu
152 pp, softcover
ISBN: 978-1-882291-04-5
$17.00 USD
For other information and sample poems, see his website, www.keithholyoak.com.

Will Hornyak
Is a teacher at Marylhurst University, Portland State University, and a former journalist in Latin America. He has performed workshops for the U.S. Forest Service, the American Cancer Society, the American Art Therapy Association and numerous festivals, theaters, libraries, colleges and churches. Hornyak is a frequent artist-in-residence in schools. His 1997 recording World Voices, World Wisdom is a collection of myths and folktale from Native and Latin American, African, Middle Eastern and Celtic oral traditions. Hornyak lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

David Horowitz
Founded and manages Rose Alley Press which primarily publishes books featuring Pacific Northwest rhymed metrical poetry. He earned bachelor's degrees in philosophy and English from the University of Washington and a master's degree in English from Vanderbilt University. In 2007 he edited and published Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range, an anthology of contemporary poetry of the Pacific Northwest. His own poetry collections, all from Rose Alley Press, are Stars Beyond the Battlesmoke (2008); Wildfire, Candleflame; Resin from the Rain; and Streetlamp, Treetop, Star. Many of his poems have been published in fine literary journals, such as The Lyric, Candelabrum, and The New Formalist. Some of his recent essays have appeared in Exterminating Angel and the IBPA Independent, a journal specializing in helping small press publishers. He gives frequent readings in and around Seattle, where he lives. David won the 2005 PoetsWest Achievement Award. His web site is www.rosealleypress.com.

Thomas Hubbard
Thomas Hubbard's Midwest, blue collar parents were "breeds": Native American and Anglo. His free-verse poems and detail-rich stories are products of a long, wide-ranging life between the two worlds, and a firm connection to the present. He calls up memories of loving and being loved, hitchhiking back and forth across 1960s America, raising kids, learning to plow with a horse, studying Zen, finding allies in the plant world and sailing in all kinds of weather. He frequently writes of the glass factories where he traded childhood for manhood. And he often refers to his experiences as a parking lot attendant, mechanic, carpenter, bartender, musician, silversmith, cabinetmaker, teacher and freelance feature writer for magazines. But he mainly writes about what's happening here and now. His literary influences include Alan Watts, Kerouac, Hesse, Wolfe, Ginsberg, Steinbeck, Carver, Barthelme, Oates, Bukowski, Robbins, DeMaupassant, Chaucer and R. Crumb, and thousands of anonymous short-story authors.

Hubbard's first chapbook, Nail and other hardworking poems, was published by Year of the Dragon Press, Seattle. He also compiled, edited and published Children Remember Their Fathers, an anthology of thirty-three performance poets writing about their fathers. Since retiring a few years ago from teaching in the alternative high school on Tulalip Reservation in the state of Washington, he has published two more chapbooks: Junkyard Dogz (also available as a spoken word CD), and injunz (Gazoobi Tales, 2007) as well as a short story, "Dog Salmon," for Red Ink magazine. His poetry has appeared in the anti-war issue of Arabesques Review: International Poetry and Literature Journal, and ToTo's Poetry International Fall 2006, Albani: Indigenous Poetry and Other Voices International Poetry Anthology as well as in numerous other publications. He has read for the Distinguished Writer Series in Tacoma; presented A Workshop at Whidbey Island Writers Conference; featured for Whatcom Poetry Series, Seattle Slam, and numerous other venues, and reviewed books for Square Lake and Raven Chronicles. He is available for readings, as well as editing, design and publication of print media (http://www.gazoobitales.com).

Thomas Hubbard, born 1938, holds a Bachelor of Science in English, Education, Sociology, Ball State University, 1969; and graduate studies at University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; St. Edwards University, Austin; Indiana University, Bloomington.

Holly Hughes
Holly Hughes has spent the past 26 summers working on boats at sea in Alaska in a variety of capacities, including deckhand, cook, gillnetter fishing for salmon, to working as a naturalist on a cruise ship. During that time, she served as skipper for Crusader, a 65-foot wood schooner which offered seminars on art, writing, natural history and native culture in both Southeast Alaska and the San Juan Islands through the non-profit organization Resource Institute. For the past 17 years, she has taught a variety of writing classes at Edmonds Community College, serving as co-advisor to the literary/art journal, Between the Lines, co-director of the Convergence Writer's Series and co-coordinator for the Sustainability Initiative. She lives in a log cabin built in the 1930s in Indianola.

Holly has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the Arts & Letters Prize 2003. She has done residencies at Hedgebrook, Centrum, and the Vermont Studio Center, and she is a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. Her poems have appeared in The Bellingham Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Hedgebrook Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, americas review, Pontoon, and in the anthologies, America Zen: A Gathering of Poets, Family Matters: Poems of our Families and Dancing with Joy: 99 Poems. Her essays have appeared in Crosscurrents and an anthology: Steady As She Goes: Women's Adventures at Sea. For eight years, she has participated in the Fisher Poet's Gathering held each spring in Astoria. She has been a reader for the Robert Sund festivals in the Skagit Valley and at the Frye Art Museum. She is the editor of Beyond Forgetting: Poems and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease, forthcoming from Kent State University Press. Holly Hughes's latest chapbook Boxing The Compass is from Floating Bridge Press.

Richard Hugo (1923-1982)
Born Richard Franklin Hogan in White Center, just south of Seattle, he was raised by his maternal grandparents. (In 1942 he changed his name to Richard Franklin Hugo.) In The Real West Marginal Way, he described the effect of growing up in the stern and silent household of his grandparents as having left him "a mess" and crippled in social skills, especially around women. He took refuge in fishing and baseball, and these pursuits became lifelong passions. In World War II he was a much-awarded bombardier in the Army Air Corps. He took poetry classes with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, and he worked for a number of years as a technical writer at the Boeing Airplane Company. His first book of poetry, A Run of Jacks, was published in 1961 by the University of Minnesota Press. Many of his poems, especially the early ones, were about local places that were important to him, as in his Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (1965). The poems often describe the tough side of life and the tough-minded folks living it. Friends and friendship were crucial to Hugo all his life, and he seemed more comfortable around blue-collar folks. In 1970s Hugo taught Creative Writing at the University of Montana in Missoula. A collection of his essays on the writing of poetry, The Triggering Town, was published in 1979 by W.W. Norton & Company.

Paul Hunter

Connie Hutchison
Writes free verse and haiku. She is an active member of the Haiku Society of America (Northwest Region Coordinator, 1997-2001), Washington Poets Association (President, 2003-2004), National League of American Pen Women (President, Seattle Branch, 2004-2006), and the Kirkland Choral Society.

Her haiku have appeared in Brussels Sprout, Chiyo's Corner, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Timepieces, several haiku anthologies, and Haiku World, An International Poetry Almanac, edited by Wm. J. Higginson. The Northwest Region anthology, to find the words, for which she was editor-in-chief, was the winner of the First Place H.S.A. Merit Book Award in 2000.

In 2002 she was awarded First Place in the WPA Baxter Poetry in Performance contest. Her free verse has been published in Washington English Journal, PoetsWest Literary Journal, Signals, Life on the Line (Negative Capability Press), and Weathered Pages: The Poetry Pole (Blue Begonia Press, 2005).

Christopher J. Jarmick
Author, poet, writer, and co-author of the mystery suspense thriller, The Glass Cocoon (2001, with Serena F. Holder). Before moving to Seattle he worked as a television producer-director-writer and documentary filmmaker (PBS-KCET & KOCE). His credits include: Hard Copy, Entertainment Tonight, Personalities, On Trial, Crimes of the Century and PBS's Square One TV. He has written over 300 movie reviews for print and internet sites (such as Senses of Cinema, Tablet, Cult Cuts, Amazon.com and others). He wrote an award winning one-act play, many short stories, newspaper and magazine articles and essays, several mostly un-produced screenplays and a lot of poems. His poetry has been published in The Cambridge Book Review, South District Journal, Real Change, PoetsWest, Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, Meeting of the Minds Journal, Peeks and Valleys in the anthology, Dewdrops at Dawn, and others. His 30-part prose poem "Red House Tavern Tales" is being published serial style by Washington DC's Brutarian Magazine. Recent articles have appeared in Beacon Hill News, Cult Cuts Magazine Tablet, The Seattle Times, and Mystery Review Magazine. He's featured in Who's Who in Entertainmentand is the current president of PEN-Washington, and is a former executive vice president of the Washington Poets Association. He is a financial advisor, tutor/teacher, frequent panelist and moderator at several conferences and events. He is the founder and host of two lively poetry series, Take a Poem into Your Heart, in Columbia City and the Ugly Mug Coffee House at the north End of Renton. You can contact him at glasscocoon@hotmail.com.

Laura Jensen (1948- )
Born in Tacoma, Washington, she completed her undergraduate work at the University of Washington and received her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She has been the recipient of grants from the NEA, Washington State Arts Commission and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She lives and writes in Tacoma.

Author of several collections of poetry, her books include:
The Distinguished Poet Series, a broadsite collection, Tacoma Arts Commission, 1996
A Sky Empty of Orion, Meadow Press, 1985
Memory, Dragon Gate, 1982, reissued by Carnegie Mellon Press in 2006
The Story Makes Them Whole, Porch Publications, 1979
Tapwater, Graywolf Press, 1978
Bad Boats, Ecco Press, 1977
Anxiety and Ashes, Penumbra Press, 1976
After I Have Voted, Gemini, 1972.

Mike Johnsen
Started writing 40 years ago, and began focusing on poetry in 2003. He has published one collection of poems titled Garage Sale. Three of his poems appear in the 2007 edition of Between the Lines. Another two are found in the 2008 edition of the University of Washington's literary journal, Clamor. In August, he begins his second residency at the Rainier Writing Workshop's MFA program, at Pacific Lutheran University.

His website, theseattlemuse.com, focuses on unpublished authors, and literary resources.

Mike is a prose poet, and his work is generally somber. His poems expose often unseen ironies of life. They are powerful, and intensely personal. And he has this thing about redheads.

Georgia Johnson
Has been a featured reader at several local bookstores and galleries including Watermark Books, Anacortes; Red Sky Poetry, Seattle; and Lucia Douglas Gallery, Bellingham. Her chapbook, Finding Beet Seed, published in 2000 (but now out of print) featured poems about the Skagit River.

E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (1861-1913)
The daughter of a Mohawk chief, she was born in Ontario, Canada. This poet, essayist and short story writer was related to both Chief Joseph Brant and the American writer, William Dean Howells. She attended Indian schools but was an avid reader of Scott, Longfellow, Shakespeare, Byron and others. Her collections of poems include The White Wampum, published by Bodley Head, Canadian Born (Geo. Morang of Toronto, 1903), prose, Legends of Vancouver (McClelland & Stewart, 1920). After traveling extensively for a number of years on speaking tours, twice to England, she settled in Vancouver, BC. She crisscrossed the continent several times, drove up the Cariboo trail to the gold-fields and was an ardent canoeist. She died in Vancouver, BC on March 7, 1913. She remains one of Canada's more popular poets.

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Tammy Kaiser
Tammy Kaiser was born and lived in Palm Beach, Florida for twenty years before moving to Seattle. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in PoetsWest, Calliope, Indigenous Fiction, The Raven Chronicles, Mind Trails, Meow, The Family Times, Futures Magazine and many others. She is the author of Memorials: Poetry for Performance, co-author of Making Love in The War Zone, and editor of The Survivor Project.
Ms Kaiser currently teaches kindergarten for a Jewish school in Bellevue, Washington and does Holocaust Tracing for the American Red Cross. Her involvement in International Social Services has taken her all over the world. When she isn't writing, Tammy collects World War II memorabilia and studies languages such as Hebrew, Yiddish and German.

Nicholas Karavatos
Was a manual worker by day and a poet-musician by night before going into debt to complete his formal education. A graduate of Humboldt State University in Arcata and New College of California's Poetics Program in San Francisco, he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. His poems have appeared in After the Fallen, Blackbox, Certain Stones, Cherry Bleeds, Country Activist, debt, Earth First! Radical Environmental Journal, EcoNews, Edge City Magazine, Humboldt-Central American Solidarity Newsletter, Juke Jar, Log, Minotaur, mirage[periodical], Paisley Moon, PoetsWest Online, Prophetic Voices, Prosodia, San Fernando Poetry Journal, Steelhead Special, Thieves Jargon, Tight, Travelling Poet, Toyon, Unlikely Stories and What the Hell. He read in eleven cities the summer of 2008 in the western United States. Check his website: http://nicholaskaravatos.blogspot.com/.

Jourdan Keith
Seattle's 2006-2007 Poet Populist. An outstanding poet and very active in the literary community, Jourdan is committed to her own writing and presenting it to the community as well as helping other writers young and old do the same. Jourdan is the founder of Urban Wilderness Project, which provides storytelling, restoration and adventure programs. through her non-profit organization, the Urban Wilderness Project, bringing inner city youth to the wilderness. Another of her projects is her trademarked program, Griot Works, which trains youth and adults to become storytellers through workshops and performances. Like ancient Griots, participants learn the importance and responsibility of keeping personal history and culture alive in the form of storytelling and poetry.

Jourdan is a Jack Straw writer and Hedgebrook alum. A 2004 grant recipient from the Mayor's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs for the choreopoem, "The Uterine Files: Episode I, Voices Spitting Out Rainbows," her publication credits include ColorsNW, Seattle Woman, KUOW, the video "Silence...Broken" and the anthology, Ma-Ka, Diasporic Juks.

Richard L. Kenney (1948- )
This award-winning poet is the author of Evolution of the Flightless Bird (1984), Orrery (1985), and The Invention of the Zero (nonfiction, 1993). He teaches English at the University of Washington.

Cynthia Kidder
An "accidental poet," Cynthia began writing poetry about five years ago as a "self-help" process in getting through a difficult period in her life. From those beginnings, she quickly moved into writing for the love of it. She has been published in several collections and anthologies, includingRaven Chronicles and House of Many Rooms (published by Poetry Today in Wales, UK.). After working for a year as editor of PoetSpeak-Vancouver, she now spends her time working with poets in the Vancouver, Washington area in a poetry cooperative, the NW Poetry Coalition, featuring performance, teaching and open mike venues.

Marion Kimes

Carolyn Kizer (1925- )
Kizer was born in Spokane and educated at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and the University of Washington, where she studied under Theodore Roethke. In 1959 she co-founded Poetry Northwest, the prestigious poetry journal, and served as its editor until 1965. That same year her first volume of poetry was published by the Portland Art Museum. Her first major collection of poetry, The Ungrateful Garden, was published in 1961 by Indiana University Press. Throughout her long literary career, Kizer had been a teacher, editor and outspoken critic, as well as poet and essayist. Copper Canyon Press selected her collection of essays, Proses, as the inaugural publication (1993) in its Writing Re: Writing Series. Usually considered the most versatile of Northwest poets, she is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Pulitzer in 1985 for her book, Yin: New Poems (BOA Editions, 1984). In 2002 Kizer received a Lifetime Achievement in Poetry Award from the Western States Book Awards. In Harping On: Poems 1985-1995, published in 1996 by Copper Canyon Press, she challenges us with her biting wit and intelligence. She has capped an extraordinary writing career with her latest volume, a collection of her poems between 1961 and 2000, in Cool, Calm, & Collected, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2001.The collection earned First Place from the Paterson Poetry Prizes for 2002, a Silver Medal in Poetry from the 2001 California Book Awards, and First Place from the 2001 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Robert Kroetsch (1927- )
Northwest audiences may know this internationally-known Canadian poet, essayist and writer for his interest in the Klondike Gold Rush and the writings of the poet, Robert Service. His novel, The Man from the Creeks, published by Random House Canada in 1998, was based on his research and ruminations about that period. Kroetsch grew up in rural Alberta and was graduated from the University of Alberta (1948) with majors in English literature and philosophy. A few years later, he returned to college and received his M.A. from Middlebury College in Vermont (1956), and his doctorate from the University of Iowa (1961). He taught at S.U.N.Y. from 1961 to 1978 before moving to the University of Manitoba. He received the Governor General's Award for Fiction in 1970 for The Studhorse Man, and in 1986 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

His major publications include:
A Likely Story: The Writing Life, Red Deer College Press, 1995
The Puppeteer (fiction), Random House, Vintage Books, Toronto, 1992
The Lovely Treachery of Words (essays), Oxford University, Toronto, 1989
Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1989
Excerpts from the Real World: prose poem in ten parts, Oolichan Books, Lantzville, B.C., 1986
Advice to My Friends: A Continuing Poem, Stoddart, 1985
Alibi (fiction), General Publishing, Toronto, 1983; Beaufort Books, New York, 1983
Letters to Salonika, Grand Union Press, 1983
Essays: Robert Kroetsch (criticisms), Open Letter, 1983
Seed Catalogue (poems), Turnstone Press, 1978
Stone Hammer Poems 1960-1975, Oolichan Books, 1976
The Ledger (poems), Applegarth Follies, 1975
Badlands (fiction), Stoddart, Toronto, 1975
The Studhorse Man (fiction), Macmillan, Toronto, 1969.

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John William Kulm This very popular poet has appeared in The Peoples' Poetry Gathering, New York; The Impala, Los Angeles; Adelaide Fringe Festival, Australia; Lollapalooza; The National Poetry Slam; The Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada; and on National Public Radio. An education in Biblical Studies from Trinity Lutheran College, dynamics of slam poetry, concise language from stand-up comedy, and a farming background all influence John's style. Gazoobi Tales published John's book, The Five Stages of Quitting Farming, in 2002.

William Kupinse
Poet Laureate of Tacoma 2008-09 and associate professor of English at University of Puget Sound. Teaches classes in British Literature, Creative Writing and interdisciplinary writing courses. Recent poems have appeared in journals including: Cimarron Review, Sea Stories, Green Letters, and The Fourth River. Kupinse is also the author of several articles in scholarly journals and anthologies, as well as a poetry chapbook, Raw Materials. With the help of co-editor Tammy Robacker, he is compiling an anthology of Tacoma-area poets to be released in April 2009.

Patrick Lane (1939- )
Born in Nelson, British Columbia, Patrick Lane has read widely around the world. He was awarded the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1979. His publications include:
Winter, Coteau, Regina, 1990
Milford and Me, Coteau, 1989
A Linen Crow, A Caftan Magpie, Thistledown, Saskatoon, 1985
Woman in the Dust, Mosaic, Oakville, Ontario, 1984
Old Mother, Oxford University, Toronto, 1984
The Measure, Black Moss, Windsor, Ontario, 1981
Poems, New and Selected, Oxford University, Toronto, 1978.

Wanda Z. Larson

Alan Chong Lau
His publications include:
Blues and Greens, University of Hawaii Press, 2000
Songs for Jadina, Greenfield Review Press, N.Y., 1980.

Evelyn Lau (1971- )

Dorianne Laux
Is the author of three poetry collections: Smoke (2000), What We Carry (1994), and Awake (1990), all from BOA Editions. She is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997). Her poems have also appeared in The American Poetry Review, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Five Points, and The Best American Poetry. The winner of a Pushcart Prize for Poetry, two fellowships from the Natl. Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she teaches in the University of Oregon Creative Writing Program.

Jenifer Browne Lawrence
Was born in California and raised in Alaska. She currently lives in Poulsbo, a small community near Seattle. She is a recipient of a Washington State Artist Trust grant and the Potomac Review's Annual Poetry Award. She has been a finalist for the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her work has received a Pushcart nomination and is published in various journals and anthologies, including the North American Review, the Comstock Review and the Potomac Review. Her poetry collection, One Hundred Steps from Shore, was released in 2006 by Blue Begonia Press.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929- )
Ursula Kroeber was born in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her parents were the anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, and the author, Theodora Kroeber. She went to Radcliffe College, and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married the historian, Charles A. Le Guin, in Paris in 1953. They have lived in Portland, Oregon since 1958, and they have three children and three grandchildren.

Ursula K. Le Guin has written poetry and fiction all her life. Her first publications were poems, and in the 1960s she began to publish short stories and novels. She writes in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children's books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts for performance or recording. To date, she has published eleven books and chapbooks of poetry, twenty-three novels, over 100 short stories, four collections of essays, eleven books for children, and four volumes of translation. Her best known fantasy works, the six books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her most recent book, Lavinia, gives voice to Virgil, the dutiful, but barely known, wife of Aeneas. Three of LeGuin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and she has received a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, a Pushcart Prize, and the PEN/Malamud Award. She is the 2001 recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Shambhala published her poetic translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching in 1997 and her fifth book of poetry, Sixty Odd, in 1998. She collaborated with Argentinian poet Diana Bellessi on translating each other's poetry (The Twins, the Dream, from Arte Público Press).

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
Levertov, born in England to an Anglican priest (a Russian Jew converted to Christianity) and a proud Welsh mother, was educated at home. During World War II she worked as a nurse in London hospitals. A year after her first book, The Double Image (1946), was published, she married an American writer, Mitchell Goodman, and moved to the U.S. She became a naturalized citizen in 1956. Her writing became thoroughly American in style, influenced by her association with the Black Mountain School of Poetry and the writings of William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, and Wallace Stevens. During the Vietnam War she went to jail for taking part in anti-war demonstrations. She voiced her social activism in The Sorrow Dance (1967). After the war other social and political issues continued to guide her writing, making her a major voice in American letters. In addition to her many volumes of poetry, she taught at the university level nationwide, was poetry editor of Nation and Mother Jones, and translated other writings.

Steven C. Levi
A freelance historian and writer living in Alaska, Levi has more than thirty books in print, half of them history. He has a BA from the University of California Davis and an MA in history from what was then San Jose State College in California. He moved to Alaska in 1976 to work as a college instructor on remote military bases. After a year in the bush, he settled in Anchorage where he has lived ever since. In addition to his books — which range from Westerns to mystery, how-tos to scholarly history and poetry to action adventure, he is also a software developer. He won a $40,000 award for "Creativity in Motion" from the University of Oklahoma in 2005 for his Creative Thinking Software Tutorial. His prototype can be found at www.parsnackle.com; enter through CONTENTS and then INTRODUCTION AND CONTENTS. Levi is married and lives with the most expensive free dog in the universe. His goal is to actually make a dime off his writing.

Kim-An Lieberman
A writer of Vietnamese and Jewish American descent, born in Rhode Island and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She attended Shorecrest High School and the University of Washington (where she double-majored in English and Comparative History of Ideas) before earning a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, ZYZZYVA, CALYX, Threepenny Review, and the anthology Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. Currently a faculty member at Seattle's Lakeside School, Kim-An has taught writing and literature at every level from 5th grade through college. Her first collection of poems, Breaking the Map, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2008.

Judy Lightfoot (1943- )
Judy Lightfoot is a poet and freelance writer who was born in Pennsylvania and moved to Seattle in 1969. An award-winning teacher with a Ph.D. in English literature (U.W. 1974), she taught for twenty-five years at Seattle's Lakeside School and eight years at colleges including the University of Washington. Her freelance articles and reviews appear in the Los Angeles Times, Seattle newspapers, and elsewhere. In 2000 she was honored by the Society of Professional Journalists for Excellence in Journalism and won an award from the Seattle Arts Commission for a book in progress.

Lightfoot's poetry appears in many publications, including A Millennium Reflection: Seattle Poets and Photographers (U.W. Press, 2000). Her first chapbook of poems, Calling the Crow, was published by Brooding Heron Press (Waldron Island, WA, 1998). Its title reflects a recurrent theme in her work — that making poems and sending them into the world invites a disquieting visit from an emissary of the dark. Yet the crow's noisy mischief reminds us that if we want to put together anything new, something must come apart. Lightfoot's poems begin in an opportunistic scavenging of detritus that she hopes can eventually develop a dark shine and a pair of wings. She's fascinated by the resources and resistances of the English sentence and by the generative tensions between ordinary speech and the free verse line. Visit her lively web site at http://www.home.earthlink.net/~judylightfoot/.

Charles Lillard (1944-1997)
We became acquainted with this Canadian poet, historian, journalist, and fiction writer when he served as one of the judges for the literary contest sponsored by the Klondike Gold Rush Centennial Committee of Washington State. Lillard was born in California, raised in Alaska, and educated in the U.S., Europe and Canada (B.A., M.F.A.). From 1958 to 1966 he worked as a boom man and roustabout on the Northwest Coast, and from 1967 to 1974 he worked for Environment Canada. He then taught at several universities in Canada, was editor for the Provincial Archives of British Columbia, and writer-historian for the Royal British Columbia Museum. He is the author of several books of poetry and history. His Seven Shillings a Year is a history of Vancouver Island. His last volume of poetry, Shadow Weather, was a finalist for the 1996 Governor General's Award. At the time of his untimely death, he was working on a history of Chinook jargon. This slim volume, A Voice Great Within Us, was completed by Terry Glavin and published in 1998 by New Star Books.

"Revenge of the Pebble Town people: A raid on the Tlingit", based on the true story of a Haida war party, was one of the last poems Lillard wrote. This epic poem was published after his death in a special issue of BC Studies and other journals.

Mr. Lillard's poetry collections include:
Shadow Weather: Poems: Selected & New, Sono Nis Press, Victoria, B.C., 1996
Circling North, (awarded the 1988 B.C. Poetry Book Prize)
The Colour of Winter Air
Drunk on Wood
Voice My Shaman
Volvox: Poetry from the Unofficial Languages of Canada (with J. Michael Yates), Sono Nis Press, Victoria, 1971.

His other publications include:
The Brother XII: the Devil of DeCourcy Island (with Ronald MacIsaac), Porcépic Books, 1989
Ghostland People: Documentary History of the Queen Charlotte Islands 1859-1906 (Editor), Sono Nis Press, Victoria, 1989
Warriors of the North Pacific&ldots;, Sono Nis Press, Victoria, 1984
In the Wake of the War Canoe (Editor), Sono Nis Press, Victoria, 1981
Mission to Nootka, 1874-1900 (Editor), Gray's, Sidney, B.C., 1977

Ellaraine Lockie
Poetry is her "foremost literary love." She has received over 200 individual awards in the genre, including the Kay Snow Award for Poetry, the Cindi Bell Memorial Award, the John E. Meeker Award, and the Currycomb English Award, as well as First Places in contests sponsored by the Quincy Writers Guild, Women in the Arts, Gulf Coast Writer's Association, French Bread Publications, Lucidity, Blue Sky Waters, California Poetry Society, Arizona Authors' Association, Annual Berkeley Poets' Dinner, North American open Poetry Contest, Tickled by Thunder, Poets at Work, and numerous county fairs. She was a semi-finalist in the Discovery/The Nation contest and a finalist in the Writer's Digest contest.

Hundreds of her poems have been published in journals, anthologies, magazines, and broadsheets in the U.S. and internationally, both in hardcopy and online. Nine have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her chapbook, Midlife Muse, won Poetry Forum's annual chapbook contest in 2000 and was published there. Three more chapbooks followed: Coloring Outside the Lines by the Plowman Press (Canada) and Crossing the Center Line by Sweet Annie Press and Finishing Lines by Snark Publishing. Another is upcoming from PWJ Publishing. Ellaraine has also been a featured poet in the Chiron Review, the premier issue of Mind's Eye Newsletter and Muses' Review. She has had solo poetry broadsheets published by Alpha Beat Press, SCW Publications as a Shirt Pocket Book, and has an upcoming broadsheet in the Rooftop Chaplet Series. Her poetry appears on rented bicycles, in rented cars and in bookstores and coffee shops as part of the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf Project in Madison, Wisconsin, and one of her poems will soon be tacked up all over the world by vendors who represent the publisher, BROADSIDED.

Ellaraine travels often and participates in poetry readings wherever she finds them and has been a featured reader for numerous poetry groups. She frequently serves as a judge for poetry contests, most recently for the Taproot Literary Review, Poets at Work, Arizona Authors Association, and the Sacramento Towe Automobile Museum's annual poetry contest. She is the founder and mentor for the Bear Paw Poets' Society in her hometown of Big Sandy, Montana, where she also originated, sponsored and judged an annual poetry contest for high school students. She has been a guest poetry lecturer at Occidental College in Los Angeles, a resident poet at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico, and at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington.

In addition, Ellaraine teaches workshops on poetry and the creative process at libraries, schools, recreation departments, and writing groups across the western U.S. Her articles/essays, many on the subject of writing, have appeared in an eclectic mix of magazines, such as Once Upon a Time, Lummox, Poesy, rattlesnake review, Apollo's Lyre, Collectors' News, Collector's Journal, Military History, Poesia, and Women in the Arts Newsletter.

Her children's stories have won multiple awards from Byline contests and First Places in the Florida State Writing Competition and Talking Story for Coastal Kids Contest in Oregon. She also writes a column in the National Button Bulletin called "Button Bits" and has been featured in magazines, newspapers and multiple cable television programs. She has read poetry on LUVeR Radio segments, on several KSER 90.7 FM radio shows (Seattle area), and is scheduled for an interview on Book Crazy Radio Network. She recently co-edited with Patricia Wellingham-Jones the memorial issue of the journal, Nanny Fanny, as a tribute to its late publisher, Lou Hertz.

She also writes nonfiction books, magazine articles/columns, book reviews, and children's stories. Her nonfiction books include All Because of a Button: Folklore, Fact and Fiction (St. Johann Press), The Gourmet Paper Maker, Creative Publications (US) and Collins and Brown (England) and a forthcoming book, The Low-Lactose Kitchen Companion in 2007.

Jeanne Lohmann (1923- )
Born in Arcanum, Ohio, she was graduated from Ohio State University and earned her M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She lives in Olympia, Washington and describes her work as having to do with transformation of perception, experience, language, re-vision (many times!), and pressing toward the place "where words come from." Her poetry has appeared in Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, Yankee, Crab Creek Review, Santa Clara Review, Pontoon, and in several anthologies: Wild Song, Cries of the Spirit, Heart of the Flower, Prayers to Protest, and The Practice of Peace. Her work also appears in two chapbooks by Olympia poets: Gathering Stones and Ends of the Earth. Her Greatest Hits was published by Pudding House Press. The most recent of her five collections of poetry are Granite Under Water (companion to a prose journal, Gathering a Life, both from Pendle Hill), Between Silence and Answer, also published by Pendle Hill (1994), Flying Horses (Fithian Press), and The Light of Invisible Bodies (Fithian Press). She has received awards in the William Stafford competition from the Washington Poets Association and has led workshops in various places.

Priscilla Long
Priscilla Long (www.historylink.org/PriscillaLong) was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and grew up on a dairy farm on the eastern shore of Maryland. She has a B.A. degree from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. and an M.F.A. from the University of Washington. Her stories and poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Ontario Review, Fourth Genre, Under the Sun, The Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, The Seattle Review, Passages North, Southern Humanities Review, Raven Chronicles, PoetsWest, and elsewhere. She is the author of Where the Sun Never Shines: a History of America's Bloody Coal Industry (Paragon House, 1989).
Her awards include a National Magazine Award for Best Feature Writing (2006 for "Genome Tome" in The American Scholar, the Journal's Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Richard Hugo House Founder's Award, awards from the Los Angeles and the Seattle Arts Commissions, and the Mary Roberts Rinehart poetry prize. She teaches writing and serves as senior editor of the online encyclopedia of Washington state history, http://www.historylink.org.

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